Perhaps, show that they have the same canonicalized
representation using an xml processor that support c14n.
From:
mike@xml-solutions.com [mailto:mike@xml-solutions.com] On Behalf Of michael odling-smee
Sent: Wednesday, September 09,
2009 5:49 AM
To: XML Developers List
Subject: [xml-dev] CDATA headache
All,
Firstly apologies if I am posting this to the wrong forum. I am currently
having an issue convincing my customer that our processing engine is working
according to XML specifications - the issue is to do with CDATA sections.
In the input document there are various elements that contain CDATA sections.
The nature of our processing pipeline is to strip off some wrapper XML
structures (via XSLT) passing on the XML payload where these CDATA sections
reside. Now the issue is that in the output document the CDATA content has been
replaced with their equivalent characters individual escaped i.e.
<value><![CDATA[<sender>John
Smith</sender>]]></value>
becomes
<value><sender>John
Smith</sender></value>
Now I am well aware that these are entirely equivalent from an XML standpoint -
however the customer point of view is if they are equivalent why has the parser
altered the way the characters are escaped? On this front it is unlikely that
links to sites such as http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/cdata.html#d3164e447
will be enough to convince them that our processor is behaving correctly - they
need a formal specification. I have searched the XML specification (to no
avail) and was wondering whether anyone could point me to the relevant place
which specifies that this is expected behaviour of the parser/xslt processor.
Kind regards,
Michael
